Amongst a rapidly expanding landscape of heritage sites opening their houses to the public for Christmas, Waddesdon Manor was losing market share to houses offering more immersive installations with higher integration of light, sound, projection digital integration.

Transform Waddesdon's existing Christmas House Trail into a cutting edge, industry leading installation to regain it's best-in-class status.

To transform the audience's experience, we needed to start by going all the way back to the narrative. Following discussions with the Waddesdon team to understand their current and targeted demographics, as well as their business goals to grow the experience, we opted to focus on a collection of cherished British fairy tales that had strong ties to Waddesdon Manor's collection, rooms and history.

Using this overarching theme as our basis, we then worked to design the experience, amassing an experience 'bible' containing our developed narrative flow as our audience moved through each of the rooms, along with detailed references of props, decorations, lighting reference and more.

From here, we identified key moments where projection was to play a key role, as well as a list of immersive soundscapes and narrative excerpts we would use to bring even deeper immersion and richness to the user journey.

With all of our preparatory work complete and a clear vision for the experience, we jumped into production, sourcing the props and decorations for the rooms, alongside the fabrication of custom elements such as the Mad Hatter's Rabbit, Cheshire Cat and Magic Mirror to name a few.

One the digital side, we developed the projection content, using scanned 3D models of the rooms to test projector specifications to ensure that the hardware solution was robust. The content was generated using a ombination of 3D, 2D and AI generated visual elements. We also developed the soundscapes for each room in line with the narrative and props, recorded all key narrative passages to work as voiceovers within key rooms throughout the journey, and assembled a custom musical playlist for each 'act' of our story to aid the sense of distinctness for each story in our collection.

All of this work led up to the big moment; installation. Working alongside the production design & curatorial teams, we installed over 80 lighting elements, over 30 sound components and 5 projections across the house.

The event generated enormous positive public feedback, press & social outlet attention, and increased visitor numbers by over 50%.